Chapter 12 Baz
The photographer’s name is Dominique and she photographs animals for a living. Within four minutes of walking into our apartment she has looked at the Stanley Cup, the backdrop stand, the garment rack, and the two cats watching her from the bookshelf. “Okay,” she says. “I’ve done weirder.”
“What does LITTER C mean?” Dominique asks, pinning it to the rack.
“Nobody knows,” Sadie says. “It arrived in a dream. It felt right.”
Sadie let herself in at nine with iced coffee and the energy of a woman who has been waiting since January for this. She is wearing a shirt that says CAT WRANGLER, which she had made. She and Tikh divide the room the way they always do, her volume, his stillness, both of them somehow in charge.
“Day two of the Cup,” she announces. “How’s it going so far?”
“Nine out of ten,” I say.
“What’s the missing point?”
“Keeps everybody humble. That’s what Berger says.”
Tikh, from the kitchen, where he is portioning out the emergency treats into little dishes like ammunition: “The missing point is that yesterday cannot be repeated.”
Sadie looks at him. Looks at me. Points between us. “I don’t know what happened yesterday and I want it noted that I’m being incredibly cool about it.”
The Cup wants to be photographed. It has been doing this for a hundred years, it hits its angles, it needs nothing.
The cats are a different professional situation entirely.
Bug regards the Cup as furniture that betrayed her by being interesting to other people.
Mishka regards it as a throne he has been owed since birth.
He will occupy it on his own schedule. That is not on anyone’s schedule.
Dominique builds the set like a pro. Backdrop, bounce light, the Cup on a riser draped in black. Tikh stands off-frame with the treats, because the cats will do things for Tikh they would never do for the rest of humanity. Same as me.
“What’s my light situation?” Dominique asks, metering off the bowl.
“The Cup has no bad angles,” I tell her. “A hundred years of pictures. It knows what it’s doing.”
“I was asking about the window.”
“The window is also a professional.”
“One picture,” Tikh reminds the room. “The agreement was one picture.”
“The agreement was one posted picture,“ I say. “The shoot is unlimited. This was in the fine print, Tishka. You should read contracts.”
“I have read our contract. It says I get final approval.”
“It says we both get final approval.”
“Yes,” he says, unbothered, shaking the treat dish once. “And I approve one.”
What follows is ninety minutes of the greatest athletic performance this apartment has ever witnessed. I say that as a man who won the Stanley Cup. Mishka enters the bowl on attempt one, sits like a portrait of a nineteenth-century industrialist, and refuses to look at the camera on principle.
“He won’t look at the lens,” Dominique says.
“He is deciding whether you deserve it,” Tikh says.
“How long does that take?”
“It could be years.” Bug will look at the camera but will not stay in the bowl.
She exits over the rim the instant I put her in there.
Eleven consecutive times. Finally she has to be lowered in mid-purr by Tikh, like expensive cargo.
There is a period where both cats are in the Cup and both cats are asleep.
Instantly. In defiance of all preparation.
Dominique shoots that for ten minutes straight, whispering, “don’t wake up, don’t wake up,” like a prayer.
“How long can we keep shooting like this?” Dominique whispers.
“Until one of them dreams,” Tikh whispers back. “Mishka runs. Bug bites. We will know.”
“Why are we whispering?” Sadie whispers. “The bell rings when she so much as thinks.”
The bell does not ring. History holds its breath.
“Twelve,” Sadie says, catching the escape one-handed without looking up from her phone. “Franchise record. Somebody log it.”
And then it happens, the frame we came for, and of course nobody staged it.
Bug and Mishka in the bowl together, awake, tucked into a yin-yang the exact shape of a bonded-pair diagnosis.
Bug’s chin on Mishka’s back. The tiny jerseys crooked.
Mishka’s paw hooked over the rim. Both of them looking dead into the lens like champions.
Dominique makes a sound I recognize. It’s the sound I made when Bug first fell asleep on my chest at two in the morning.
The sound of getting something you’ll keep.
“That’s it,” she says. “That’s the one. Nobody breathe.”
The bell on Bug’s collar dings once, softly, for emphasis.
We break for gumbo. There is a lot of gumbo.
There is going to be gumbo for days, out of a pot that Sadie circled twice when she arrived.
She asked about it. Then she went quiet in a way that Sadie almost never goes quiet, and squeezed my arm on her way to the fridge.
She knows the full story. She was the first person to know any of my stories.
Last winter hers was the only name on the list of people who knew me.
Now the list has a team on it. A mother on speakerphone.
And a man who will approve exactly one picture.
While we eat, Dominique’s laptop cycles the day’s shots on the coffee table. Four hundred and eleven frames. Tikh sits in front of it with his coffee doing his quality-control face. Blank. Thorough. Merciless. It takes him half an hour. I know better than to talk during an audit.
“Two hundred and six,” he says finally. “That is the one for posting.”
“Out of four hundred and eleven,” Sadie says, to the room, like a docent.
“The margin matters,” Tikh says.
We crowd in. It’s the yin-yang frame, obviously, the champions, the paw over the rim. It is objectively the greatest photograph ever taken.
“Wallpaper,” Sadie announces, phone already turned around as proof. “Consider all debts settled.”
But I watch his laptop when he thinks the audit is over, and he goes back, quietly, and stares at a second frame.
And it’s not the cats. It’s a frame Dominique caught between setups.
Me on the floor with Bug on my shoulders, laughing at something Sadie said.
The Cup blurred gold behind me. The pot just visible on the counter at the edge of the frame.
The whole loud mess of my life in one picture, and the quietest man I know filing it away like evidence.
“Tishka.”
“It is for the archive,” he says, with dignity.
“We have an archive?”
“We have an archive.”
The keeper inspects the bowl at seven and holds one gray cat hair up to the light.
“One,” he says.
“Mishka,” Tikh says, like a man giving up an accomplice.
The keeper decides against every possible sentence and logs it.
The Cup goes back in its case, off to the next man on the schedule.
The apartment absorbs the space it leaves the way our apartment absorbs everything now.
Easily. The shelves shifting half an inch to make room for the new permanent residents.
A jar of sea glass throwing coins of light.
A pot with forty years of history in it.
Four hundred and eleven photographs, one approved, one quietly archived.
Tikh posts the picture at eight. No caption. All the while, the group chat is already detonating. Berger demands print rights. Marchetti asks where we got the jerseys because now Parker needs one.
Sadie leaves at nine with gumbo for three days and both of our hearts in her tote bag, same as always. The cats commandeer an empty box in the hall, a two-cat coup, bell dinging in the dark.
Some guys got parades. Some guys got hometowns. I got a Tuesday and a Wednesday in a tenth-floor apartment. A borrowed trophy. An inherited pot. A best friend in a custom shirt, two cats in tiny jerseys, and a man who keeps an archive.
I would rate the day, but Tikh says you don’t put numbers on the permanent things.
He’s right. He’s always right. Don’t tell him. He’s in the archive too.